


ink, salt, light

by ninemoons42



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alliances, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Demons, Alternate Universe - Hunters, Alternate Universe - Magic, Dark Past, F/F, Faithful Canine Companion, Familiar Characters with Different Powers, Families of Choice, Gen, Magical Battle, Magical Tattoos, Magical Warfare, Messing Around with Magic, Past Abuse, Past Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Past Child Abuse, Ragtag Band of Heroes, Sacrifice, Survivor Guilt, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-09
Updated: 2013-10-22
Packaged: 2017-12-28 22:40:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/997757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The war has been raging for some time now. The forces of Hell will not go down without a fight. </p><p>Charles is a soldier in this war, and now he's got one hell of a badge to prove it - and he'll need every ounce of strength he's got to keep carrying that badge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. inscribed

**Author's Note:**

> Been MIA for a bit. Had a nasty month-long case of writers block. It was inflicted upon me. I'm trying to fight back by posting this new thing as a WIP.
> 
> The thing I really wanted to say is this:
> 
> Bullying is wrong. It just is. There are no excuses. There can be no sympathy. Bullying hurts people and pulls them down. If only we could wish it away - but we can't, so instead, we gotta fight. And we gotta lean on each other. We gotta help each other to fight and stop bullying.

Waking up is slow, and strange, and very much like clawing back up from a migraine. He hates it when his head hurts, and his head hurts unfairly often, in his very not-neutral opinion. Migraines are a thing that he can almost set a damned watch to, at least one a week without fail. There are days when the headache is relatively light and relatively easy to work through - he remembers nights with his fingers cramping around a shotgun and the steady, distant throb of pain just behind his right ear.

But there are days when he can’t move for what feels like a drill bit boring into his head, straight in between his eyebrows and straight down from what feels like every single strand of hair, and those are the days when he hides in bed and grits his teeth against the useless grit of painkiller on his tongue and the endless drone of terrifying silence in his wracked mind.

This pain feels very, very much like that, and he crawls up through it and back to consciousness. Hand over hand over pain, except that this pain seems to be centered a bit further down. It pulls at his shoulders, like wire knotted around his bones and sinews, weighted down by invisible rocks that he seems to be pulling against with every muscle he has.

When he thinks he can open his eyes, he grits his teeth, till he can hear the tension crawling down his throat.

Blazing heat coupled with his overloaded nerves everywhere, with a very pointed exception made for his feet. Icy-cold toes. He wiggles them, and they move, albeit reluctantly. 

His senses are reporting in, one by one.

There is a weight somewhere in the general area of his left hip - or is that weight actually concentrated on top of his stomach? This weight shifts. It breathes. A living weight. There is something about its shape that suggests an animal, large-ish, since it’s so heavy. It smells of a bad case of halitosis.

Charles Xavier opens his eyes to dim light and to a ceiling that should have been blank, if the ceiling hadn’t been spiderwebbed with hairline cracks.

He tries to move his head, and he sucks his breath in with surprise at the fresh twinge of pain that shoots up his spine.

Steady breathing in the room, not just his own, as he finds out when a gruff voice mutters to him. “You’re pinned down for a reason. Don’t move.”

A sound of a book being snapped shut. A click that means - a lighter? Scratched-up steel, gnarled fingers, a soft yellow flame that sputters into and out of existence.

Charles looks up. The man standing over him has gnarled scars all over his arms. Tattered sleeves in some kind of faded plaid. A cigar teeters precariously in the crook of his mouth, and his hair is a tangle that seems to shoot out in all possible directions and a few that should not exist. 

Charles finds himself fumbling for a name, and comes up short, and his embarrassed whisper sounds like words being scraped over rough sand. “I’m sorry, I think you look familiar, or one of the others has mentioned your name - but I can’t remember.”

The man’s cigar moves with every succinct syllable of his reply. “Name’s Logan, kid. And welcome back. You’re alive. You survived. Congratulations.”

Charles tries a smile in response, and feels it drop off his face in the very next moment. “Yes, I think I’m alive. I don’t know what I’ve survived now. And you look unhappy that I’m awake.”

Logan shrugs. “Lost a bet.” He clicks the lighter again into sharp fuel-scented flame, and touches its yellow tip to his cigar. When he inhales and exhales the room fills with the smell of dust in the rain.

“I should be offended,” Charles says, “because you just told me you bet on me dying. I hope whoever won that bet is happy with the winnings.”

“Like I said, kid, you’re alive. So Emma wins. So maybe we all have a chance of winning.”

“I don’t understand.”

This time Logan’s shrug is accompanied by a quiet snort. “And what makes you think I do? I’m going to get someone who’ll talk to you. Or at least, you better hope they’re willing to talk to you. Kind of doubtful. You’ve given half the people here the scare of their lives. There’s a reason this dog,” and he motions to the lump on Charles’s hip, which is indeed a dog - a lugubrious-faced bulldog, mostly white with brown patches, “is stuck to you.” 

After a moment, Logan switches the cigar to the other side of his mouth. “Do you remember who got you into this situation in the first place?”

Charles opens his mouth before he thinks better of it. “Me.”

“Damn right. Stay there. Don’t move.” 

“Where am I going,” Charles asks, faintly.

The smoke that Logan leaves in his wake is blue, and it lingers in long curls, and Charles stares at that smoke until his eyes begin to water.

What has he done to himself this time, he thinks, as he tries to get comfortable and is rewarded with a sharper flare of pain, this one concentrated exactly halfway between his shoulders and the small of his back.

The bulldog snuffles, lets loose a mighty yawn with a lot of teeth. 

He doesn’t know if he should laugh or cower or ask it to fetch him something. A pair of slippers, maybe, or a lot of painkillers.

But the dog moves away and half-falls off the bed and scrabbles clumsily off in Logan’s wake before Charles can do anything, and that leaves him alone with his thoughts, with the fact that he’s stuck here. Logan’s phrase: “pinned down”, like a butterfly on display. He struggles against the temptation to just get up. He can feel his legs, he knows he can walk, but he can’t move.

He braces his forearms and elbows against the blankets, tries to lever up -

And the door is slapped open. 

A woman in most of a white suit: she’s missing her jacket and one earring. Dark stains on her shapely hands. Strands of her pale blonde hair are falling out of the bun at the back of her neck. Her icy blue eyes are full of - something. He’s used to her being well-nigh unreadable. “Charles. Please don’t move. You’ve been through quite the ordeal.”

“Which I apparently inflicted upon myself,” he says to Emma Frost, who is still wearing a belt full of shotgun shells around her waist.

She sighs, and shakes her head, and sits down in the same place where the bulldog had been. “You volunteered for it, yes. Over and above every single objection I and mine could raise.” She touches the inside of his wrist. Her fingers are warm. “Damn it, but you’re stubborn.”

“That I already knew.” Charles closes his eyes, but the image of Emma still glows in his mind. “Emma. I can’t remember what happened.”

She sighs again, and pulls something out of her pocket.

A long, thin piece of finely machined steel, hollow. The triangular point is still covered in the same dark substance that seems to cling stubbornly to her hands. The lines at the corner of her eyes turn into deep furrows when she asks, “Do you know what this is?”

“It’s a needle of some kind,” Charles says.

“Specifically, it’s a tattoo needle,” Emma says. 

“So the black stuff on your hands is ink?”

“Yes. Properly, it’s called Nara ink. Black now, as you can see, but that’s because it hasn’t dried yet. When that happens it’ll turn blue-green - and that’s the color most of your back will turn.”

Most of his back? How much of it? Charles flinches in surprise, and the movement shudders through him, from his shoulders on down.

Pain flares up in every inch of his skin in response, and he hisses and grits his teeth and clenches his fists, willing himself to stay absolutely still. He wants to look. He wants to dig into his skin, claw the ink out. He wants the ink to penetrate more deeply into him, because he remembers, now, what he’d asked to have done.

When he comes back to himself the icy mask of Emma’s face has cracked, much like the ceiling above her, and he can see the worry in her, the concern that lives in the lines of her face. 

“Did you - did you do everything? The whole thing? Everything on the page in the book that Moira found?”

Emma winces, there and gone again, a brief expression of commiseration. “Everything, and then some. Logan suggested adding a totem or two to each shoulder blade. I had to fit them in around the protective circles. And Sean said that there was no harm in putting in the words of a banishing song, so I fit that in, too.”

“I want to see,” Charles says.

But it’s more than the pain that holds him down to the sheets - too late he notices that he’s bound from shoulders to hips with a series of strong, supple, invisible lines of force.

“I think Logan mentioned the word ‘pinned’,” Emma says.

Panic wells up in Charles and he forces it away, but not without an effort. He swallows down the nausea that threatens to choke him. His voice is more ragged than ever when he is able to speak again. “Until when?”

“Until we determine that you’re all right,” is the sharp answer. “Yes, Charles, we get to decide, not you. I know you, and I remember every single time you lied and said that you were all right when you were decidedly not. Not going to happen this time.”

Charles tries to smirk. Plays his trump card. “You need me to be up and on my feet, Emma.”

“I need a Charles who’s alive and capable of using the damn magic that’s been written into his skin more than I need a Charles who’s an idiot,” Emma snaps, and the fire in her eyes is all too familiar to Charles, except for the fact that it isn’t normally humans who are on the receiving end of that glare.

He’s seen lesser demons turn tail at the merest hint of a frown.

He wants to run, now, and he can’t.

He tries to look away, and he tries to close his eyes. To no avail. He can still feel Emma’s ferocity, the barely-leashed power of her, trickling inexorably out of the wards and bindings she’s set upon herself. Power enough to sear a body down to dust. Power enough to turn an ordinary shotgun shell into something that can kill anything. Power, pressure, and the looming presence of her, taking over the room, driving out air and light and life.

And then the pressure vanishes as suddenly as it’d come.

Charles gasps for breath, swallows heavily, before he can look at her again.

She is still frowning at him, and the sternness lingers in every line of her, but - there it is. A spark in her eyes that he’s become more than familiar with, as the years have gone by. A strange thought, in and of itself, as strange as the sympathy that he can now clearly see in Emma’s face.

And, tentatively, he lets himself feel that same sympathy, lets that emotion dig in deep and turn into something stronger. Something more powerful.

Here is the fundamental difference between himself and Emma:

He’d asked to be made into a weapon, and every line of the ink that she’s put in to him is a part of that weapon, a part of himself, and he’d been willing for every single moment of it. Willing enough to insist that he be put through the entire agonizing process, the days and nights and endless minutes of needles and ink piercing his skin.

Emma made her choice long after the fact of her own marking. Or perhaps she was pulled to it, pushed headlong into it. The story exists in bits and pieces within their group. 

The silence is eventually broken by a small huffing sound, heralding the reappearance of the bulldog. Charles cranes up, just a little, enough to watch its clumsy scrabbling ascent of the bed, its sloppy landing in Emma’s lap. “Whose is that?” he asks, eventually, for lack of anything else to say.

“No one’s,” Emma says. “But apparently it followed Logan here. Don’t let the gruff voice fool you. He’s been sneaking meals for this one.”

Charles almost smiles. “Does it have a name yet?”

“We’re calling it Max, for now.”

“Okay.” Between one breath and the next Charles suddenly feels so, so tired, and he yawns while he’s saying so. “Does that happen a lot? I’m so tired. I feel like I’ve been building bigger and bigger wards. And not just bigger. Much more complicated.”

“Which is, funnily enough, exactly what you’ve been doing.” Emma pushes Max carefully off her lap, and Max wiggles over to Charles, never getting back to his feet, and settling against Charles’s hip again. “The process takes its power and its strength from you. All I did was put in the guidelines. The rest’s entirely up to you. And that’s why you’ve been sleeping for the better part of the past week.”

Alarm raises a red flag somewhere in the hazy fatigued mists of Charles’s mind. “A week - but Emma - ghost months - you can’t possibly have enough people - ”

And then Charles suddenly falls sideways into sleep.

He’s most of the way to gone, and he’s not sure that he can hear her properly over the heavy breathing of Max, but he has just enough presence of mind to hear what Emma has to say in response:

“Even if I was the only one left here to defend you, Charles, I’d do it, and willingly.”


	2. besieged

Running, Charles thinks, his thoughts jumbling up in heaps and tripping all over themselves in the bargain. It always comes down to the running.

And now running is a little bit more difficult because he has a Max to think of: Max, who generally shuffles around and gets in everyone’s way when they’re hunkered down in a safehouse, but who manages to haul his pounds and pounds of doggy blubber out of the line of fire when they’re under attack.

The pernicious thing is that he runs with Charles, and only with Charles - and so Charles has to be very careful where he puts his feet, lest he trip over the dog or step on him or, worse, get tangled in his leash.

It would not do for him to fall. Not here, and certainly not now.

The very ground itself seems to be screaming in pain beneath his feet.

A voice slashes through the smash and the rattle and the smoke and Charles growls, grits his teeth, stoops to pick up Max - even when the dog squirms and fights to get back down - Charles knows whose voice it is, and Charles knows the words that are coming if that voice is shouting, and the only thing he can do right now is to get out of the way.

Behind him he can hear something infernal, something growing - growling and scrabbling and guttural. It sounds like everything wrong with the world is chasing him. 

He’s seen demon attacks before, and he’s lived through ferocious ones. He’s been on the front lines, and he’s thrown down his weapons to fight with his bare hands and his own blood. He’s fought and bled and been dragged out of the fray; he’s led and followed and lived - just barely - only to get up and leap back into the thickest of the fighting.

But the time when they counted months and years between those kinds of battles is done and over with. He can see the ashes of that time flying on this hellish wind that breathes down his neck, that leaves him choking on sulfur.

Max whines, loudly, and stops struggling.

That’s a bad sign.

Charles wraps his arms more firmly around the dog and starts murmuring to himself.

The voice that calls him grows stronger and stronger and he throws himself towards it.

He passes Sean, weighed down with the medicine box and the bag full of books. He passes Logan and the girl who’s recently taking to following him around, who sings beautiful songs in her sweet slow drawl. He can’t remember her name, not yet, since she’s only been with them for three days or so. 

The girl is running backwards, her face frozen in a rictus that is half fear and half determination. She’s guarding Logan’s back: the flying flames cast demonic light into her eyes and those flames must be blinding, blue flares and blood-red, but that doesn’t stop her from shooting. Her hands move rapidly and familiarly over a familiar shotgun, and she catches the shells that Logan throws over his shoulder with just a glance’s warning.

Charles smiles, takes strength from their easy teamwork, and raises his voice. The syllables are rough and they scrape against his throat.

A fleeting glimpse of Emma: she’s holding the line and the others are streaming past her, and her hands are aglow. She nods at him, silently asks him to keep going.

The prickling pricking feeling all up and down Charles’s arms and shoulders and back turns into a full-blown burn. Blazing-hot barbs burrow into his shirt, worm past the cloth, and he very much wants to protest - he wants to drop the dog, wants to scream - but he keeps whispering instead, through gritted teeth.

There are so many voices laughing behind him. 

He’s lagging enough that he’s starting to make words out in the cacophony, words and terrible promises, sweet poisoned sentences. 

The shadows and the flames whisper to him of power: a power that would disintegrate him and remake him anew, that would give him a world in which he could hold the scales of justice in his hands. A world in which he could bring back the souls of those who had wronged him, who had hurt him, and force them to make atonement even from beyond the earthly embrace of the grave.

He can still plainly remember, as though it were just yesterday, the first time he’d seen Emma: down on his face in the mud, his stolen jacket reeking of smoke and spilled blood, broken bones and boot-shaped bruises. He remembers rolling and fetching up just short of her boots, blinking up at her, his eyes refusing to stay open. He remembers being unable to speak, and the taste of iron on his tongue.

He still has nightmares of those days from time to time; he’s just gotten better at lying about them to the others. 

Now the voices tell him he can reflect every injury and every insult back upon those benighted souls who’d hurt him, and Charles blinks back tears, blinks away the temptations, and finally lets Max go - he screams, “Run, Max, run, go to Sean!”

A hand takes his. Cool and callused and gentle.

Charles shakes his head, swallows his tears, and looks up - 

“Hello,” Moira says, interrupting her song. She sounds calm and gentle and solid.

“Hello,” Charles says. He hangs on, and he can see his own knuckles turning white, and he doesn’t see any pain in the lines of her face.

Moira is no longer calling out, but now she doesn’t have to: the echoes of her voice are still whirling all around them, seeming to fight the flames, seeming to push the raucous demon-voices away. Her voice is in the wind that shakes the trees around them. Her voice is in the earth beneath Charles’s feet.

He takes a deep breath, a clean breath, and smiles at her. “Thank you.”

“Always.” Briefly her eyes glow, like a beacon, like a flame leading the others home - a light that grows more powerful as Emma backs toward them. A slight frown, a trickle of sweat down her temple. 

Charles watches Moira reach out to the other woman. Her free hand wrapped around Emma’s wrist, delicate, powerful. “If the others are safe - ”

“They are,” Emma says without looking over her shoulder. Her voice is a little brittle around the edges. “And if they’re not, if they’re still here, that’s on their heads and not ours. This is not exactly a first skirmish.”

“For some of us it is.”

“I don’t have to worry about that girl Logan picked up. Him and his strays. They’re out of this circle, they’re safe. Maybe she can be trained.” 

Moira smiles. “We’ll see.”

“They’re safe,” Emma insists.

“Good.” Moira turns back to Charles. “Shall we link?” Her smile is as sweet as it is full of power, and it is a smile that pours strength into Charles’s limbs. “We’ll need your strength, newly minted as it is.”

Charles takes a deep breath, and feels every line and every word written upon him, and nods. “Take all the power that you need.”

Moira nods, and her eyes slide closed. 

He feels her hand tighten around his. 

He watches as Emma grabs Moira’s hand with both of her own.

“Thank you,” Moira whispers - and then, she _reaches_ into him, for the power that he carries within him.

To his ears, the world goes silent.

He looks up at the swarming hordes of grinning faces, ugly teeth and greedy eyes and clawed hands. He looks up at strange weapons tipped in blood and in brimstone. 

Moira begins to speak, and after a moment, Emma joins her. The words fall into the earth beneath their feet and flow out into shifting strange lines of light.

Emma growls, once, but whether it’s from strain or disgust or effort, he can’t tell. All he hears is her voice, commanding, compelling: “Push, Charles, help us push it out!”

He doesn’t question her - he doesn’t question himself, not even when he raises his free hand towards the slavering faces. He doesn’t think, he just heaves the light in the direction of his enemies, and the ache that begins to pound somewhere between his ears doesn’t daunt him, doesn’t stop him.

It’s easy to ignore the pain, after all, when he can see what the light does to the demons: he sees the light spear through them, tear through them, and their raucous laughter turns into screaming, into flesh ripping apart.

It’s Moira who voices the thought in Charles’s head: “That’s better,” she murmurs, looking over her shoulders to check for flanking attacks. “A little more won’t hurt, though.”

Charles is more than damp beneath the collar, and it should be uncomfortable, but he sets his distaste aside and musters up a smile for the others. “A _lot_ more won’t hurt.”

“I like the way you think,” Emma says.

Charles smiles, and tries to keep the smile on, as power flows from him into the others - and his reward is everything that isn’t human, that isn’t tree or plant or climbing vine, dies in bits and pieces.

Demon ichor stinks if left to stand in the soil, if left to dry on a rock. It kills plants and animals and people. So together they boil that all away, destructive flash-vaporization, and the screams and the cursing die away, incoherent rumble dying down.

“Almost there,” Moira murmurs, encouragingly.

Silence, and then - Emma takes in a sharp breath. “Not quite.”

Charles starts, stretches out his senses, and - he feels it too. “There’s something out there,” he whispers. “There’s something _big_ out there.”

“How big?” Moira asks.

Now that he’s really listening for it he can hear the steel that was always in her voice. It pours courage into him and he grasps at it gratefully. “You need something big to command a horde like this.”

Emma laughs, briefly, contemptuously. “We’ve had those before, Moira, haven’t we?” 

“Yes, we have,” is the reply. “We didn’t know much then.”

“We know a little more now.”

“So what do we do,” Charles asks, trying to swallow down his fear.

“We’re not running,” Moira says. “Not unless we want to involve the others, which, _no_. We’re doing nothing of the sort.”

“Logan?” Charles asks.

“Better at defending. We need him to protect the others,” Emma says. “So it’s us.”

“It’s always us,” Moira says. “Because there aren’t any others.”

“Because we know how to fight.”

“Yes. And fight we will.” Moira looks at Charles, then. Her eyes are filled with both kindness and strength. “We need power like yours, but if you want to withdraw now, there’s no dishonor in it. We’ll cover you. This is the kind of fight that needs experience.”

“Which I will never gain if I run,” Charles says, after a long and agonizing moment. “And what else should I do with all this power?”

“Good answer,” Emma says, brisk and commanding. “Let me lead this time,” she adds, to Moira.

“Of course,” Moira says.

Something groans in the near distance.

“Brace yourself, Charles,” Emma says, and he doesn’t know if she’s telling him to get ready to fight or run or if she’s telling him to stay right where he is.

The thing that lumbers out of the forest, felling trees with its too-broad shoulders and too-long arms and hands ending in red-tipped claws, has way too many teeth and three pairs of eyes. Sulfurous clouds hung about it, making Charles and Moira cover their mouths and noses with their hands.

Emma groans softly, swears, and _draws_ , and her power nearly drives Charles to his knees. 

Somehow he stays on his feet, looking at the steadily diminishing space between them and the great dark being moving towards them, advancing with a murderous intelligence in its eyes.

The power in Emma suddenly flares out, forms a brightly glowing human-shape. It is armed: it brandishes a sword at their enemy, and when she screams - a sound that’s like blades in Charles’s mind, welcome, grounding, like unexpected hope - that shape lunges forward, a whirlwind of attack, and in the first few exchanges the hulking shadow of the demon does fall back, roaring with furious futility.

“That’s it, Emma, keep going,” Moira murmurs, steady and calming as always.

Backed into a tree, their enemy shrieks and counterattacks, and the blows throw great branches to the ground, cause the very rocks to shiver, and in the end Charles can’t keep standing - he falls to his hands and knees.

“He’s strong,” Emma hisses after another powerful exchange.

“Which only means that we have to defeat him sooner rather than later,” Moira replies. 

Charles only notices that the two women are still joined together by their hands when Moira adds, “Emma. It’s time to let me go.”

The reaction is immediate and furious: “ _No,_ Moira. Not now, not ever.”

“They’ll need your help.”

“And they don’t need you? Moira, all I know is how to lead. You know how to care for them. You know how to understand them.”

“So do you, Emma. You are just different from me.”

Emma turns away from the beast, turns fully in Moira’s direction, and in her face is a snarl of emotions that Charles cannot read. “You didn’t see it coming exactly like this.”

“I saw a vision, Emma, and a feeling that goes with that vision, and I am feeling that feeling now. Let me go. Take Charles and take the others. _Live for me._ ”

“Moira, I - ”

“I should have told you how much I loved you, so many more times than I ever had - ”

“You were the only one who ever loved me, Moira - ”

“You know that you were mine, Emma. And I will always be yours.” Something else flares in Moira, then, power and something else, something greater, and beyond them the sword of light strikes at their enemy, pummeling it, smashing into it. “Yours, now and forever, until we meet again, until we’re free.”

Charles finds his voice: “I - Moira, you have to come with us - ”

She smiles at him. She’s aglow, she’s in tears, she’s a flare of overwhelming strength. “I can’t, Charles. Here this road ends.”

He levers himself up to stand, and he wobbles and nearly falls flat on his face in the process, not once but twice.

When he’s on his feet Moira is walking away from him and from Emma both, never looking back, walking towards the clash of their power and that huge demon. Moira’s voice rises in song, one last defiant melody - 

Emma’s face, streaked with tears; her hand, powerful and bruising, as she seizes his shoulder and starts running, and he has to run or be dragged along behind her - 

They fall headlong into the trees as the voice they leave behind climbs into a terrible final crescendo - and Emma screams, power and pain and parting, and Charles turns, covers his face, and runs, blind, already knowing that the last blow is about to land.

He leaps, and a huge wave of energy catches him in its claws, throws him head over heels, and the last thing he remembers is Emma’s voice, screaming Moira’s name.


	3. alone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note special warnings for this chapter: there is discussion of past abuse and attempted non-con here.

He wakes up, and he thinks he should be sore or that some part of him - maybe several parts of him - should be broken, because he can still taste that explosion on the tip of his tongue. Spiky bits and pieces of wood, resinous and bitter; the loamy hardness of soil caught in his teeth and lodged up his nose; leaves and grass on his skin.

A distant idea of blood, of shattered life, that his mind pushes away, as though desperate to protect itself from the truth.

He refuses to acknowledge the shadow that he sees at the foot of his bed: a shadow shaped like a woman, small and slight and towering all at once. A space in the world that once had been filled with power, full to the brim and then some, strong and steady and missed now that it’s gone.

How that shadow came to be gone is something that he will not, not, _not_ think about. He can’t bear it. He must not remember.

Still, a name escapes him, and he can’t take it back; and the second name very nearly drives him to tears.

_Moira. Emma._

Neither woman is here.

He’s alone, and he doesn’t want this to turn into a habit.

Torn bits of green and brown crusted beneath his fingernails, scraped into his skin. When he puts his hands in his hair he shakes dust onto the sheets.

The water in the glass on the low table next to the bed is flat and tasteless. As he swallows it down, desperate to quench his thirst, he has to fight the urge to sick it all back up - he has to force himself to swallow the taste of the forest that he remembers fighting in.

Fighting in, and then being turned away. _Yanked_ away. Hands pushing him to run, slapping at him every time he tried to look back.

He finishes the water and coughs, raw and wet and painful, and he says the others’ names again.

“ _Moira_ \- Emma - ”

Silence.

He doesn’t even know about the others. About Max - did they get out in time, and did they get the dog out? Is Max okay?

Charles takes a deep breath, chokes down his panic.

He calls out again.

The step that moves in his direction, answering him, seems to come after such a long time.

This time the woman who stands over him has fiery red hair, hacked off short, so only a few loose ends brush the grimy collar of her tattered shirt. The weak and wavering light of the room cannot soften the planes and scars of her: she looks like rocks, roughly piled together into the shape of woman.

“I - ” Charles fights down the gasp. Tries to speak evenly. “I’m looking for my friends.”

The woman stares at him, blank-faced.

At first he thinks the pattern around her eyes, like strange dark spikes or wings, is nothing but a trick of the light or the place where she happens to be standing.

Then she blinks, and her face falls into an expression of concern, and the lines on her face move as well - and he realizes that she’s wearing some kind of marking, too. Inked, like him, and in a place that cannot be hidden. Here she is with her face bared and turned to him. No escaping her eyes, no escaping her lines.

“I’m Rachel,” the woman whispers. A ravaged voice, unfurling into whispers at the edges. “And I don’t know why you’re talking about friends. I found you and only you. There was no one else in that place. And I know it pretty well - I’d have known they were here, if they were here - ”

Charles cuts in: “There was a woman who was pulling me to safety - she was blonde, not much taller than you. Dressed in white. You couldn’t miss her. No one could.”

Rachel shakes her head. When she speaks again she sounds almost sad. “I’m sorry. I saw no one but you.”

All the air leaves Charles’s lungs in a desperate _whoosh_. He falls back into the bed without noticing the impact, or feeling the hard planks beneath the thin blankets.

If Emma’s missing, if she isn’t here, then how can he hope that any of the others survived?

If there’s no one for him to return to, then who or what does he have to live for?

Moira’s voice whispers in his ear, indeterminate, powerful, gentle. He closes his eyes, squeezes them shut, until he feels the tears fall towards his ears. He can’t make out the words. She’s there, with him, somehow, only she’s not. What he is carrying around is the shade of her, the last memory: the woman who sang as she strode to meet death.

He’s lost, he’s mourning, and he almost doesn’t hear it when Rachel speaks to him again.

“You’re like me,” she whispers.

He turns in her direction. The tears prick at his eyes. She’s a blur, standing rigidly next to the bed. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“Yes. I am, too.” She points to her face. “This is - this is not a mark of the living.”

Charles blinks. 

“This is a deathmark,” Rachel says. “I fought a dark shadow, and I won. The hollowest of victories. The number of people who had to die in order for me to succeed - ” She sinks into a chair, low to the ground, and when Charles struggles back up he’s looking down into the pain shading the lines in her face. “This is the mark of a curse. Someone or something is going to come along, finish what that shadow started.

“Are you that someone or something?”

He pulls back, shocked. “I - no! Why would I kill you?”

“Because you’re carrying a mark, too.” Rachel touches the back of her own neck. “You’re marked from the neck down. I’ve never seen anything like it. Words of power, of protection. Stars and circles and so many symbols. I could only understand bits and pieces.”

“I’m not here to hurt you,” he says. “I - I don’t actually know what I can do, now. I don’t know where my friends are. I don’t know what happened to the ones who saved my life. They were the ones who put these marks on me.”

Silence, then: “What is the purpose of the marks?”

Charles shakes his head, just a little. “You already know. Wards, and words of warding. Something to amplify my power, and something to focus it.”

“They wanted to make sure you’d survive,” Rachel says after a moment.

“And I don’t know what for.”

“You are without a cause.”

“Yes.” He can’t keep the bitterness out of his voice.

He’s alone again.

“You’re not alone,” Rachel suddenly says.

Charles looks up, and doesn’t bother to dash his tears away.

“You said it out loud. So I’m saying, you’re wrong. You’re not alone. You can stay here, with me, until you find the strength to - I don’t know.” Rachel wrings her hands together in her lap. The lines in her face shift and shiver with each rasped word. “I don’t have any consolation to offer you. I don’t have any advice. There’s just these rooms, these wards - ”

He watches her wince, and look away.

Silence falls, and he looks at the door, looks at Rachel’s white knuckles, looks at the specks of blood on his arms, the patches where his skin has been seared away.

It’s a lot like meeting Emma for the first time.

“The last time I ran away from home,” he whispered, “they kicked my ribs in, both sides. Near broke my nose, too, but by then I could dodge better. Or maybe they’d gotten slower, gotten too used to me being such an easy target.”

Rachel’s voice sounds like rocks grating together when she asks, “Who is ‘they’?”

A brittle question, a loaded answer.

Charles doesn’t dodge this one, because there’s no point in dodging. This is a question that he will have to answer for the rest of his life, answer it and take his own words for the blows that they are. “They were - no, I won’t give them those names. They’re not my family - they were _never_ that. Strangers in the house that was mine, that had been left to me. Strangers who wanted to take everything that I ever had and ever loved, past and present and future.” He bares his teeth and knows that he doesn’t know why he expresses his anger this way.

He clears his throat, tries to keep looking Rachel in the eyes. “They’re welcome to it now, though. I’m not coming back. I’ll never go back. There’s nothing for me to return to. They used my name, my father’s name, to take what they wanted.”

“They are - ” Rachel begins.

“They are two men. Father and son, the two of them small and stupid and foolish to the very bones. The father hit me with his fists, with his belt. The son hit me with everything else, kicked me down the stairs. They wanted me down and bleeding and bruised, silent, just alive enough to not die. They needed me to breathe and to be their puppet.”

Rachel looks horror-struck, and so do the lines in her face.

Charles gives her a brittle smile. “They wanted a rubber stamp; they needed people to know that I was around, that I was consenting to everything that they wanted - ”

“Were they abusing you - ” She motions to her thin hips, her knees.

Charles shakes his head. “It almost came to that. One close call.”

“That was the night you manifested.”

“That was the night I manifested, yes.” Charles bites his lip, hard enough to draw blood. Copper heaviness on his tongue, swallowed down with difficulty. “The son was drunk, I remember that much. His father was just irrational. Rage in his eyes instead of reason. No amount of screaming could have ever stopped them. I - I didn’t scream, I just closed my eyes, willed everything to stop.”

“And it worked?”

“Yes. It worked.” He remembers the ringing in his ears, the sudden idea of _suspension_ : everything stopping. The sound of his own controlled breathing, louder than all other sounds. Contorted faces looming over him, frozen and unaware. “I ran, and I hid, and I had no idea what I’d just done.”

Rachel reaches out to him, then - her hand on his arm is rough and small and hot.

Charles takes her hand in both of his and squeezes, hard. He’s holding on, and doesn’t know why.

“You’re like me,” she says, again, finally.

“We are runaways,” he says. “We are alone.”

“Here we can be alone together. I will help you heal,” Rachel says. “You will teach me to defend myself. I will learn about your wards. You will learn how to fight that which is coming.”

“We’ll be allies,” Charles says.

Rachel nods.

“Yes. Okay. Thank you.”

“Stay,” Rachel says, “until you have to go. Until you hear from your friends, until things have to change.”

“I will. And I want to hear your story, too, because I’ve told you mine.”

Rachel goes pale, looks apprehensive - but she squares her shoulders and looks Charles in the eyes. “You will hear it.”

**Author's Note:**

> Greatest of thanks to Afrocurl and to Nekosmuse for the kind words, and to ang3lsh1 and pangea for the encouragement.


End file.
